Anthony Tasselli
Sharkchild is a very impressive writer on a technical level. He knows how to compose elegant, descriptive sentences and string them together in a way that flows nicely from page to page, establishing a clear and consistent tone. His prose is a pleasure to read in short bursts, though it can grow monotonous over time due to just how perfectly consistent it is the whole way through. Most authors use florid text sparingly to emphasize particular moments of importance, but Sharkchild maintains that energy level for the entire text. Depending on your taste, that could be seen as either a good or a bad thing, and I myself am somewhat torn on it. On one hand, its impressive, and on another, the novelty eventually wears out.
Where I find his work somewhat lacking is in the overall structure and substance department. Each story is so short and explores ideas so shallowly that I was often left feeling confused, lost, or disappointed. Each one of these anthologies could probably be expanded into an entire short story, and they would also probably be more interesting that way.
The alien horror of Sharkchild's predecessors isn't terrifying just because its confusing and weird, its terrifying because those stories juxtapose that horror with the well-established mundane lives of everyday humans. Cthulhu isn't interesting because of what he is, but because of what he represents in relation to humanity and the effects that he has ordinary people. There's a connective tissue that unifies the idea of what Ctulhu is: an inevitable, sleeping horror that will one day plunge our world into chaos and darkness with nothing we can do to stop it, only delay it at great cost. Just seeing a tiny snapshot of the climax where Cthulhu rises, only to be discorporate on accident by a boat wouldn't have been as satisfying if we hadn't experienced the whole investigation that led to that point.
And that's all that Sharkchild's work really is: climactic snapshots without much context. It could have greatly benefitted from taking more time to slowly ratchet up the tension and build human stakes. Let us live in the characters' world for a bit and experience some normalcy so we can appreciate more deeply how the horror disrupts that normalcy. A paranormal investigator slowly going mad as he uncovers more and more dark truths is infinitely more satisfying that seeing a man instantly confronted with an elder god.
To be fair, there a few stories that take this sort of approach, and those were the ones that left a lasting impression on me. The Unlike Light features a man kidnapped by cultists braving horror so that he can return to his family at great personal cost. What the Flesh Cannot Keep shows us the perspective a man forced to abandon his family after being involuntarily transformed, and his efforts to hide his fate in order to spare them from their own horror. Other stores–whose names I can't even recall off the top of my head–are much more abstract, featuring unrelatable, mysterious, or ambiguous characters facing ambiguous stakes. Great, a guy turned into a demon. But what next? Why should I care? What should I take away from that? These are the questions I found myself asking.
It's as though Sharkchild merely apes the style of great horror writers on a surface level, without understanding what makes them interesting at a deeper level, at least to me. These stories feel mostly like random “and then” dream sequences: weird thing happens for some reason, then another weird thing happens for some reason, and so on, then it just ends without any kind of connecting tissue to tie all of these stories together. I wish there was some kind of thread or lore that was common to each of these. The Unlike Light opens the collection by mentioning a cult abducting people, and I half expected to see this cult popping up in other places as a kind of hidden villain manipulating things behind the scenes. Sadly, I was disappointed.
I will say that the physical art style of the book itself perfectly matches the tone of the writing and helped to immerse me in the world of the stories. But that's all this is: style, with less emphasis on substance. I think this collection may be worth reading as a series of macabre bedtime stories, but I was never pulled deeply enough into them to read more than one or two in a sitting.
If you approach this work as a serious diatribe on philosophy, you'll find yourself sorely disappointed. It makes some useful observations in a general sense, but a lot of the rules are blatantly contradictory. For example, one rule says to always attack your opponent's reputation, but another says not to do that. This makes the historical examples look very cherry picked in the sense that they could be read in multiple different ways to support or not support different rules simultaneously.
Another criticism I have is that, all of the examples being historical, it's not entirely clear how these rules are supposed to translate to the modern world. I don't think the average, everyday person today can really use any of these rules in a meaningful way. “Getting other people to do things for you” is easy if you're a king (or in modern equivalent, a rich CEO) but no so much if you're a poor blue collar worker.
In that sense the book feels very tone deaf to me, kind of like a more literary version of those cringe “how to be rich” videos where the first step essentially amounts to “already be rich”. It's a self help book for people who want to be told they are now Machiavellian geniuses masquerading as a philosophical text that claims to have all the answers while cherry picking history to make itself look elegant and insightful.
You wouldn't know this from the book's official synopsis (because it doesn't mention it AT ALL) but the main conceit is that it takes place in a gender role reversed version of the Victorian era. That means all the sexist things people believed back then about women are now applied to men. It also means women are larger and stronger (ridiculously so, to the point that the average woman is 6'6), more aggressive, more interested in sex, etc. Basically men act like women and women act like men.
I am normally interested in these kinds of topics but the problem here is that the level of role-reversion is taken so far that it becomes ridiculous. This is not a thoughtful novel about what it would be like to be a man in a severely matriarchal society (thereby revealing insights about what it would be like to be a woman in the real life Victorian era) and the protagonist overcoming that. No, this is a novel about men who happen to use female pronouns and women who happen to use male pronouns. Its not about feminine men and masculine women, its about men being women and women being men. What I'm saying is that each sex acts so perfectly like the opposite of real life traditional roles that it removes any possible level of subtlety or insight. You could basically switch all the pronouns and it would basically still be the same novel. That defeats the entire purpose.
Maybe this could have still been interesting but sadly there is no almost no worldbuilding to support it. I'm left scratching my head at how this society could have evolved and why the birthing-sex of the species would have also adapted to become the more athletic one. For example, we're told that all the women were recently off fighting a war. Ok, so if all the people who can give birth were off dying in wars, didn't their population have a huge crash? Aren't there massively more men than women, now? Who is taking care of babies when the women are outside all day working or fighting? Men can change diapers and cook, sure, but they don't have breasts so they can't breastfeed. And what about all the women who get pregnant? Are they still working as soldiers and guards with swollen bellies? (Actually, that would have been hilarious and almost makes me wish the author had leaned into the absurdity.)
There are very good reasons in real life why sexual dimorphism evolved the way it did, so unless the author can offer some kind of fantastical explanation about why this world should be different and how a society like that could function (which they don't) then the setting just seems flat and uncompelling. In order for it to make any sense, you'd have to say that men have breasts and birthing canals and women are impregnators, which just defeats the purpose of role-reversal in the first place.
Then there's the actual plot, which is tedious and boring. The synopsis makes it sound like this book is all about intrigue and war and interesting topics like that, but in reality its basically a regency era romance about a loveless marriage with tea parties and other nonsense. DNF'd.
Cringe writing and offensive stereotypes
I decided to check this one out because it features a femboy protagonist. I was hoping to identify with the MC since I find it very hard to identify with manly men in books.
The problem is that “femboy” to this author appears to mean “idiot who acts like a literal child and pathetically blubbers his whole way through the novel”. I'm not sure whether I should be more offended that this is just how the author thinks femboys act or if this how he thinks feminity works in general.
I've met many women in my life and none of them act like Coye. You know who I have met who acts like Coye? Children. Seriously it's bad enough that I was questioning whether Coye was mentally mature enough to consent to sex.
It was very creepy. That's not a feeling you should have while reading a sexy adult novel to say the least. It also doesn't help that women are very exploitive and domineering of Coye. Even Shayla acts like this, and we're supposed to like her. Now I am all for femdom and role reversal and all that but this is not that, it's gross.
I like the concept but the author clearly didn't want to actually explore an alternative form of gender expression and just relied on an extremely exaggerated and facile definition of what a femboy is, probably fueled by memes and internet culture.
And then you've got the world which is just every generic fantasy/isekai anime you've ever seen. Even the monster Coye fights early on is just a jack o lantern. What is this? Persona or something? It feels like it was written for kids and was really hard to take seriously especially when talking about Coyes moves in terms of “activating skills” like a video game. But then you've got all kinds of sex scenes and sexual innuendo like this. So it's too mature for kids and too juvenile for adults.
And does anything really happen in the plot? No. Just ignore this one.
To be fair, this book is a lot better than your average harem novel (not that that's saying much). In that aspect, it surpassed my expectations. However, it also falls short in a lot of ways.
What initially drew me to it was the feminine protagonist. He is often mistaken for a girl in the beginning of the novel and I thought that was interesting. Sadly, the author doesn't really lean into that as part of his character. It seems more like that aspect was just included because of the “elven pretty boy” (or in this case, half-elven) trope rather than a genuine desire to explore this type of alterative perspective on gender. There was a lot of potential in this book to do so as well. You already have the MC being a scrawny magic user in a land of barbarians that only respect martial prowess so it would have been easy to parallel that with traditional vs. alternative masculinity. Sadly that doesn't really come up.
Endrance himself comes off as highly overpowered at times. We're initially led to believe he is a novice who barely survived a duel with his master, but then he starts going around one-shotting epic monsters. It never really feels like he is struggling, ever. We get this explanation at the beginning of the book about how its so hard to know lots of magic words and how he doesn't know that many yet, but then later on it seems like he has a spell for any situation. This gets even worse when you consider that a major infodump about how his spell tattoo things work happens LITERALLY OFF PAGE, as in Endrance himself gets the info from another character but the audience doesn't get to see the conversation. It feels like the author had no idea how his magic system works and left it very vague so he could pull new tattoos out of nowhere as plot devices.
All of this might be ok if the character writing was interesting (spoiler alert: its not). Every single character just comes off as extremely tropey, from the dumb barbarian with a heart of gold, to the edgy shadow assassin lady, to even the harem members. The last one is really what disappointed me the most, because if you're going to write a harem novel then at least make the girls interesting. But no, they're all cliches: we've got the nice motherly one, the tough distant one, and the shy but secretly super badass one. They don't really get much character development or depth beyond just “I love this random kid my tribe essentially enslaved me to against my will because he was nice and didn't rape me immediately”. I mean one of them was literally just like “you're weak so I can't love you” but then instantly capitulates and falls in love once Endrance kicks her ass in a duel. Okay...that is definitely not how relationships work. Well, at least there must be some interesting dynamics right? No, after they all fall in love with Endrance the romance element of the plot is completely ignored. Aside from mentioning from time to time that they love him, you never actually get to SEE it. It makes up 1% of the book or less.
I think that's the main issue with this book. Its a lot of time skipping, a lot of telling instead of showing, and important things happening off-page. It also suffers from the “and then” style of storytelling where stuff just happens randomly because the author thought it would have been cool for the MC to fight a hydra. I wish more time had been spent on exploring the depths of the character's emotions and dynamics because all of these people are just so flat.
Then there's the ending which is a blatant cliffhanger designed to manipulate the reader into buying another book. There are plenty of interesting mysteries in this book and at first I was genuinely reading because I wanted to know what happened next, but somewhere along the way I realized I don't actually care about any of these characters or the world. Its like a mill of constant foreshadowing designed to keep you voraciously reading and not notice the lack of substance.
I went into this book thinking it was going to be more of a serious mystery thriller. Its certainly got a really interesting premise. But it turns out its more like a schlocky summer action movie. The core “mystery” of the book (that is, who is the assassin and how/why he does what he does) is revealed pretty early on and in a pretty unsatisfying way.
The female lead basically makes some very lucky/unbelievable deductions based on absolutely nothing that only work because the assassin of a super powerful illuminati-type society controlling the entire world makes some really dumb mistakes. From there the mysteries get even more lazy. Usually a character just spouts off some expository dialogue about how they somehow deduced XYZ off screen. Its not a slow burn investigation process based on thoughtful, real world logic. Characters figuring stuff out is treated more like an obstruction to the plot to be solved rather than the meat of the story itself.
That's because the book's focus is mostly on absurd, slapsticky stunts. I'm willing to suspend a little disbelief and don't typically insist on 100% realism, but some of the stuff in here is just simply cartoonish and unbelievable. For example, at one point someone drops a wooden block out of a ceiling because they apparently knew exactly where the bad guy would be standing like its an ACME cartoon or something. I think that even if this was a low budget B movie it would seem too silly.
Then there's the main character, Helga. She falls in love with an assassin she just met a few days ago because ??? and then decides to risk her entire life for him because ??? but somehow avoids any negative consequences for helping a criminal because ???. She also suddenly has the driving skill of a literal driving assassin genius who was raised from a child prodigy to do what he does, because “she was a car nerd for 3 years”. Its honestly so cringy and comes off as kind of Mary Sue.
And does the book ever question the morality of the driver assassin's vigilante-ism? Nope. Does it ever seriously explore the theme of the driver assassin being a feminine-presenting, crossdressing man? Nope. I'm all for that kind of character, and if you read my other reviews you'll see I have been actively seeking out books with people like that in it lately. Normally I at least give books that feature characters like this 2 stars, but this feels kinda shallow, as if it was mostly done to seem progressive. Combine that with the fact that the book doesn't do anything else particularly well and is too goofy even to be enjoyed as a cheap grocery store novel and I have to give it 1 star.
This book starts off where most epic fantasy stories would typically end–the hero defeats the great evil but at a heavy price and has to return to society, broken but healing. It reminds me of The Lord of the Rings, which is a recurring theme you will soon see with this book.
Instead of Frodo we have Tamsin, a traumatized elf who was once a sort of anti-hero war bard skilled with the blade and a kind of deathly song-magic. He had sworn an oath to avenge his father and recover The Flame Imperishable from the Old Enemy on another continent, which he succeeded at, killing the Old Enemy and even singing a dragon to death. But he was cursed and traumatized in many ways, having watched his brothers and many other elves all die as part of an epic war and then being forced to wander the land for years, alone, doing nothing but killing goblins.
The story picks up after all of this and quickly gets the reader introduced to Tamsin's backstory. He's miraculously alive, healed (mostly), and transported back to his original land. He doesn't know why or how or how long it has been.
An interesting setup, certainly. It immediately hooked me and made me want to know more about Tamsin. Would he return to civilization only to find that it was corrupted, somehow? Would he be called to battle once again, like the Eternal Champion of Michael Moorecock's tragic sagas? A slowly unraveling conspiracy to explain how Tamsin had magically recovered?
None of this happens. In fact, if you're expecting any kind of intrigue or conflict from this book like I was, you're going to be disappointed. Tamsin basically just goes home, gets loved by everyone, and nothing bad or challenging to the hero happens whatsoever. In fact the book mostly just rehashes Tamsin's backstory over and over again, reminding you every five paragraphs basic facts that you've already heard a thousand times, especially his ridiculously heroic feats. There are long diversions into cliche, fluffy purple prose that made me roll my eyes. Its incredibly tedious to read and Tamsin honestly comes off as the author's self-obsessed Mary Sue character, especially with how overpowered he supposedly is.
The only hints of conflict come from a brief scene where Tamsin almost wanders of into a mysterious, enchanted wood, which is never explained, mentioned again, or connects to anything going on in the main plot. The other is this idea that he is teaching an elf he befriends named Ash to fight, and that she might duel his brother in some epic tournament that is going on. But we don't get so see her actually do this, or even compete in the tournament at all, so the arc never even completes.
Perhaps some interesting world building could have saved this book, but its sorely lacking in this department as well. After reading 280 pages, I'm still not sure what exactly the Flame Imperishable was or why it was so important, what the Old Enemy was, how the magic system/mythology of this world works, or anything like that. The author seems only concerned with Tamsin, how these random mguffins intersect with him and make him seem more like a badass. What little worldbuilding there is seems lifted directly from Tolkien. Swap “flame imperishable” for “silmarils” and “old enemy” for “morgoth”, and the whip of the “fire demon” that burned Tamsin's hands for “balrog” and Tamsin's backstory reads exactly like the story of Feanor from the Silmarillion. It reads like the author either has little experience with fantasy or was too lazy to put any effort into creating an original and compelling world. You can't tell me otherwise when she made a 1:1 recreation of the most famous fantasy author of all time.
One thing I will say positively about this book (which is why I sought it out, and why I won't give it 1 star) is because it does feature a feminine male protagonist. Oftentimes these characters fall into the trap of being either pathetic wimps or only very superficially feminine. This is not so with Tamsin. Tamsin is described as being very pretty–the point that literally everyone he meets thinks he is a girl. His backstory also mentions that he used to like crossdressing, and that he and his girlfriend impersonated each other. I like that a lot because it helped me relate to Tamsin more as a character and I think we need more positive depictions of heroes like him. I just wish that he had actually, you know, DONE something interesting.
Other than that, I can't say this book has many redeeming qualities.
I had to DNF this one. It has the most cliched setup imaginable. Dark lord, chosen one, and all that stuff without anything original to put a new spin on it and tie it all together. It then proceeds to become a slice of life about a bunch of kids growing up in what seems like a modern school (despite this being medieval-esque?) together, so you're not even directly following the chosen one plot until...I don't know when, because nothing interesting happened to follow that up by the time I stopped reading, which was about 1/3 of the way through. Almost no worldbuilding, just cartoonishly childish hijinks. Heavy topics just get glossed over in a few paragraphs. For example, soldiers come and abduct lots of people from the village for some unknown reason. The teacher says “yeah its sad but whatever, we need to move on” and so everyone does. Its just such unrealistic writing. Nobody acts or reacts or talks realistically and its as if the author is just trying to move the plot along as fast as possible by making random things happen...but then its all just a bunch of boring stuff anyway. Which is puzzling because JD Matter writes excellently worded and thoughtful video essays, but this writing seems like something a teenager would produce.
Every sentence is the exact same length. It feels really monotonous because that. He says the same thing multiple times in the same voice. It is really boring because of this.
- THAT kind of writing.
Steer clear of this one. Just because the author is popular youtuber does not mean his fiction is automatically good, though I am sure there will be plenty of sycophantic 5 star reviews.
If you are expecting anything other than your bog-standard harlequin bodice ripper with this novel like I was, then you will be sorely disappointed. The male lead is a jerk who who sexually harasses then assaults the uninterested female lead, even getting rightly slapped by her for this (no one else in the room does anything of course). She then inexplicably decides that actually, she does like him after all. Its basically the James Bond “50 Nos and a Yes, Means Yes” theory of seduction. Just because the Male lead is a drag queen doesn't mean its not essentially 50 Shades of Gray. In fact, its got all the same hallmarks down to the rich, hyper attractive yet sadistic guy who for some reason becomes absolutely obsessed with a random plain jane. Steer clear of this one.
I had to give this a one star. There is almost no conflict for the entire book, and it opens with what seems like a massive time skip for Penric during which a bunch of character development must have happened “off screen”. Seems lazy to me. I would have rather read that, then a fever dream about an old man. As I said about the last book, this is a vaguely fantasy-esque slice of life. And not even interesting slice of life at that.
Its just too short and doesn't have enough depth. Penric is a flat and boring character, especially because he reacts so unrealistically to being possessed by a demon and having his life flipped on its head. I never once felt like I was really coming to understand him as a character. Desdemona (his demon) is even worse. You'd think she'd actually act like, you know, an evil DEMON...but no, she's actually pretty chill and helpful. So helpful in fact that she's really the main character here, using her seemingly omnipotent magic to easily bail Penric out of the only tense situation that ever happens. Which makes it puzzling why people even consider her a demon and take demon hosts so seriously. But then again, the setting is barely developed at all anyway. There is a lot of stuff about the five gods but none of it is every really explained. I wish it had gone into more detail because the premise SHOULD be interesting: a young man with a demon made up of the gestalt demonic consciousness of many different women. How would that work? Are there gender or other personality clash issues? Do Penric and the demon have an interesting dynamic? The answer to all of these is no. None if it is explored on a deeper level. Almost like slice of life fiction or something.
Let me get this out of the way. I am a massive elves fan. I obsessively read everything I can about elves. They're my favorite fantasy race, bar none. I also love D&D (though, admittedly, I haven't read many of the official WOTC books).
That being said...I still did not like the book. The main reason why is that its just too scattered. It opens with a dragon-ally of Evermeet (basically the blessed isles, but for D&D elves) witnessing a massive sea fleet heading there to destroy it. That, in conjunction with the title and logline of the book made me think the story was going to be about a desperate battle for the survival of the elven race. It is not that. Rather, it is a series of random, interconnected myths of elven lore and history, much of which actually predate Evermeet itself and have nothing to do with it or eachother.
For example, the first section immediately after the cold open suddenly transitions into a tale about Corellon Larethian, the androgynous father of elves, his battles with gods of various evil races that are diametrically opposed to elves, and his betrayal by his wife, who becomes the infamous Lolth, the spider queen of dark elves.
I actually liked this section quite a lot despite the fact that Lolth's origin and betrayal are already obvious if you play D&D, and would have loved if it was expanded into a whole novel, something like Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology, but for elves. Sadly, that is not what we get. Instead it tells one very specific, incomplete story about Lolth's betrayal, but it doesn't take the time to actually develop her or Corellon as characters. Answering questions like “why did she suddenly decide to turn evil for no reason” or even just explaining the mythology of where all these gods come from would have been interesting. But no, its a quick snapshot, not even a creation myth, and it fails to explain much of anything.
Like, technically, Corellon is the “father of all elves” and Lolth was his wife, but only the light-skinned elves are “children of Corellon”; they are not also called “children of Lolth”. Meanwhile, Corellon has children with her who are gods as well and are dark skinned like their mother, but there are no dark-skinned mortal elves? What about gold elves, moon elves, and green/wild elves? Like, what is the real difference between them and why are they so racist towards each other?
It's all needlessly confusing.
From there the novel starts jumping around in time so erratically it was hard to even keep track of what plot I was supposed to be following. The next section is about elves fleeing from an epic destruction of their home. “Great,” I thought, “we're getting back on track and seeing the perspective of those who escaped the battle on Evermeet.” Nope. They actually weren't fleeing Evermeet, they were fleeing an unrelated OTHER disaster in the Feywild that predates Evermeet by thousands of years. “But wait!” you may be saying. “I thought Elves came from Corellon, not the Feywild!” Yeah, me too. This story goes on to explain where elven dragon riders come from, which is cool, but then “dragon riders” are never mentioned again. Ok...so what was the point?
By this time I was beginning to forget the names of characters as soon as the chapter they first appeared in was over. At some point the narrative gets back on track with Evermeet again, and I actually thought there were a couple of characters that had “main character energy” and I would have liked to read more about. There's Lamruil, the reluctant and scandalous heir who wants to infiltrate the poorly explained villain league that wants to attack Evermeet even though he knows it will disgrace him. His wife Maura is a human who was raised on Evermeet that wants to fight to protect it even though many elves look down on her. These characters were so cool, and I wanted to actually see them to go do the cool thing that they said they were going to do. But nope, you don't get to see that. Their story ends before it even begins and moves on to something else.
This is about where I decided to DNF. I didn't know who the main characters were supposed to be anymore or what the plot was even about. I lost all motivation to read. Which is a shame, because there certainly was a lot of potential here. Elaine Cunningham describes elves beautifully and is adept at making them leap off the page with the way the speak and act. If she had committed to writing from only only two or three points of view (possibly the dragon, Lamruil, and Maura) and stuck with a single narrative (Evermeet getting attacked) then it could have been fantastic. I would have liked to see the character of Evermeet and the elven race as a whole evolve slowly over the course of an entire book, rather than just reading a dry history textbook about characters who aren't developed enough for me to care about.
I'm several hours into listening to the audible version of this story and had to put it down lest I fall asleep. Which is strange considering the exciting hook that this book opens with: two brothers setting off to kill a dragon at the behest of some human barbarians. A little cliche, perhaps, but I found myself intrigued by the promise of a unique take on fantasy lore. The titular brothers are referred to as something called “Zedaya” and the POV character, one of their servants, as a “changeling”. I'm a sucker for thoughtfully designed fantasy races that are different from the standard elves/dwarves so I was expecting a real treat aking to something like Martha Welles' Books of the Raksura: an insightful glance into the inner lives of a truly alien species.
Sadly, this is where the book first disappointed me. It's not that the characters are 1:1 for Tolkien's elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men. Rather, its that even after reading for several hours, I would have much preferred generic fantasy races if it meant that something actually happened! By the time I decided to set this down, I still feel as if I know nothing interesting about these people at all! Apparently they're immortal (they refer to humans as mortals), they don't sleep very much, and that's pretty much all I know about them. Apparently there is something called “the Garden” that both the Zedaya and the Changelings are from, that it is both a place and an idea (whatever that means), and the changelings are also ocean people. Does that mean they have gills? Why are they living on land? Why do “Ocean changeling” people come from a garden? Can they actually change shape, and if not, why are they called changelings? And most importantly, why do they serve the Zedaya? These are all interesting questions that could be used for the basis for all sorts of worldbuilding, but the book doesn't bother to go into any of that.
What little exposition there is mostly has to do with genealogies and lineages of a family trees. There are just so MANY proper nouns, and they're all so strange that its hard to remember who is supposed to be who aside from the main cast of core characters. Ironically, it did end up being very Tolkienesque, not in the worldbuilding itself, but in the sense that the worldbuilding is done in the driest and least interesting way possible.
Basically, the brothers just go around to all these different dignitaries of other lands, have some tea time, courtly gossip, and ask for help killing the dragon, get told no, then go on to the next one and repeat. Its so repetitive and dull that it almost made we want to read Jane Austen or go watch Bridgeton. Perhaps the characters would have carried the story where the plot or setting didn't, but none of them really made a distinct impression on me, and I forgot them completely as soon as they stopped being mentioned.
As a romance manga this series is very mid. There's a bunch of romantic tension and mysteries set up that never get resolved or explored by the end. It delves more into slice of life and honestly, the otaku female lead and her also-otaku friends are really cringe at times. They have little to no character growth whatsoever. That said their antics are funny and I'm on board with portraying otaku in a more positive light, so long as that's used as a vehicle to explore the societal issues causing otaku to exist. That does happen on occasion, but its pretty rare.
There are also a few characters with storylines that are very frustrating and boring to read because they're not likable whatsoever, like the spineless “rival” to the female love interest which really isn't much of a rival at all and the dumb love triangle that exists between characters that should have no reason to like each other.
Despite that I give it 4 stars because its a fantastic representation of feminine-presenting crossdressing males. Kuranosuke should be considered a femboy icon, he's badass and confident about who he is and I love it. You get to see him in some pretty amazing outfits throughout the series as well. Honestly, he is 90% of the appeal to the series and one of the heroes I most easily wanted to root for among any fiction I have read.
I've actually met Mr. Moraine in person at a book fair, and he seems like a cool guy. So its with a heavy heart that I'm about to criticize his work.
First things first. There definitely some strong points in this novel that Moraine should be proud of. I like most of the worldbuilding pillars. The main characters are a race of Amazonian beast/human hybrids with scales and fox ears. They use an interesting kind of magic, too: yarik, which I guess is life/world essence of some kind. Only, they don't do it by manipulating magic directly and casting spells the way a typical D&D wizard would. They imbue it into runic stones that store it like a battery, allowing them to create magic weapons and items sort of like an artificer. If I had to describe the aesthetic in a few words, I'd say something like “pastoral crystalpunk”. Very refreshing and original.
Yet for each of these worldbuilding wins, there are also some setbacks. The biggest one I can think of is the Valkys. They're the faux antagonists of the novel, but by the end I wasn't even sure what they really are. They show up three times and each time they are characterized a totally different way. First as mindless wind-magic wielding buffalo things, again as weird bird things, and the third time as humanoid spellcasting lizard people that can be summoned by malicious magic users. Of the three, only the last incarnation shows any intelligence, but their motives still aren't explained. It kind of seems like they just like killing Manyari (whom they are related to via breeding with humans, which poses some disturbing lore implications) for...some reason. Honestly, it kind of felt like the author just needed some monsters the heroes could beat up for the action sequences, and that's about all the thought that went into them.
You could cut the Valkys out of the story entirely and it would actually improve the work. Not least because I don't think the action scenes are even that good. They're overly technical and confusing, mostly because the magic system, while interesting on the surface, isn't really explained in depth. So it was very hard to keep track of what was going on.
Actually, that goes for the first half of the book (about 100 pages) pretty much. Nothing really happens aside from some inconsistent character development told over random time skips. One character has this big failure towards the beginning that is supposed to define her entire arc going forward. She was supposed to be punished in some harsh but vague way for what was honestly kind of a BS reason, and its supposed to explain why she is so angry and eager to prove herself for the rest of the book. But in the next time skip, people talk about her as if that just didn't happen. She even has her old job and everything. Little moments of inconsistency like these (and there are plenty of them) had me scratching my head and gaslighting myself about what I'd just read.
The plot does finally start getting interesting somewhere past the halfway mark, in the lead up to the Bonding ceremony. I can't really talk about this without spoilers so consider yourself warned.
SPOILERS
Ok, so it turns out the entire purpose of the titular Son is to act as a sort of breeding slave for all the women of the tribe prior to a ritual that will kill him. The reasons why are not exactly clear, but if I had to guess: it seems like yarik actually originates from male manyari, and the tribe is scared of what they might do if they fully mature into their power. So they use special powder along with sex to somehow get the yarik out of males and into the females so they can use it. I guess the moral quandary is that they sort of NEED the yarik to create wards that protect themselves from the Valkys. But exactly why the Valkys want to kill the Manyari isn't explained, and neither is it explained why a male manyari can't just create and power wards himself. So maybe there was supposed to be some sort of moral ambiguity here, but as is, the female manyari end up looking cartoonishly evil. Like, they're just raping and stealing magical gifts from male children because it makes their lives slightly easier and cooler.
Predictable? Perhaps. Still very vague and unsatisfying? Absolutely. But I at least found something redeeming in this section, if only momentarily. The whole “breeding slave” thing isn't played for laughs. I know that's a low bar, but the trauma and hopelessness of the Son is taken seriously and explored in depth rather than dismissed just because “he's a man and men obviously like sex” as many authors would be tempted to do. There is a clear gender role reversal here where the Son is being treated how women all too often were (and still are) in real life history. That instantly made me want to root for him to escape the clutches of an evil society that wants to use and discard him like a mindless object.
I got major punk vibes from this setup and was voraciously reading to the end. I wanted to see The Son learn to harness his special gifts and transform into a badass, or at least reclaim some agency somehow.
That doesn't happen. Instead, his mommy comes and saves him. The story itself essentially treats him the same way as all the women of the tribe view him: as an object with no agency or power, even though he is literally the one with all the power. This immediately ruined all of the good will the Bonding Ceremony initially provoked in me. It would have been so cool to see him learn to use his gifts and lay the smackdown on these assholes. Sure, mommy or another benevolent female member of the tribe could have helped him, but he should have had some kind of agency. Instead he ends the book the same way as he started: a helpless object.
Considering the next book is called “The Mother” and she already overshadowed the protagonist in the first book that is named after him, I don't feel particularly compelled to read the second.
P.S. I wasn't really sure where to fit this in, but the book also has many spelling and grammatical errors. The most annoying one was that it sometimes switches tense not only between sentences, but also sometimes within the same sentence. This really could have used a lot more editing.
I desperately wanted to like this book because I'm a massive SCP fan. I remember back in the day when the “big bad” of this saga was a new SCP, and storyline was totally unresolved. I was looking forward to getting some closure. Sure, these collected stories have been available on the SCP wiki for years, but I think compiling them this way makes for a much more enjoyable reading experience. Previously, you had to sort through the wiki and try to figure what order to read these in, and it was very confusing. So I'm glad they released this.
That being said, this narrative does have some major problems. The core ideas it presents are very cool: a secret agency that fights back against supernatural things that can't be known, that erase, eat, or corrupt memories, and even when you CAN remember them, its very dangerous to do so.
This core concept caries the first half of the book that follows the plotline of Maria Quinn. I don't want to get too spoilery in this review, but lets just say that the first half ends on a massive cliffhanger. And where it picks up right after that is where we first start to see some problems.
The first problem is the heavy redactions. I understand the conceit. The author uses it to conceal information that they can't describe because the whole point is that its indescribable in a Lovecraftian way to the characters experiencing it. And hey, I'm all for that...when used in moderation. There was some of this in the first half, but it gets abused way too much in the second half in my opinion.
Not only is it really grating to listen to the screeching redactions effects for anyone with heightened sensory processing, but it also muddles what's going on far too much. It kinda feels like the author just didn't know where the story was going next sometimes and uses redactions as deus ex machinas. Is some really bad thing about to happen to a character with no apparent way for them to get out of it? Redactions. And look here, now they have amnesia and lost their memory, now they have some new items and got teleported somewhere else. How did they escape from the problem? Who knows. We don't have to explain that. Convenient right?
This really cheapens the narrative in my opinion because victories don't feel consistent or earned by the characters. They feel artificial and forced. This made it hard for me to suspend my disbelief. I'm all for the “ordinary people doing extraordinary things when pushed to the brink” trope. But at one point we have a character who is NOT a trained wilderness survivalist or military personal or scientist or anything like that travel cross country on foot, across an ocean, and who knows what else, for months? Years? And all in a world where LITERALLY EVERY OTHER HUMAN is a brainwashed cultist trying to kill them. That's 8 billion vs. 1. But hey, they blacked out their memory of the in-between so the author doesn't have to explain that.
By the end I honestly had no clue what was happening. The first half sets up a very cold, clinical, scientific world where everything has an explanation. These are scientists, not wizards. And then by the end, we have characters spontaneously coming back to life, ascending to godhood, recreating the soon and moon, and other nonsense without any explanation. It felt like I was reading a chosen one fantasy novel–a cliche one at that–and not a cold, clinical existential horror story. Heck, even if I was reading a fantasy novel I'd want some explanation of how the character is able to do this crazy stuff they never could before. The big conceit is this “super idea” the heroes are going to use to beat the big bad. But what's the idea? We don't get to know.
Its frustrating, because the buildup to the climax was so compelling. It sets up so many interesting questions you're desperately invested in getting the answers to. This story really is emblematic of the problems with modern SCP storytelling. Everything has to be extremely pretentious and needlessly confusing, or it isn't “cool” anymore. I dunno, maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think that just because an idea is needlessly technical and complex doesn't make it cool or even smart.
The entirety of this book is build on a really shaky premise. Wizards exist in the modern world, but the best way to train them is to stick them in a death school where most of the kids are not expected to survive.
A cool concept, certainly, but unfortunately I don't think it was executed well. It's a bit hard to explain why all of this is so contrived without going into minute details of the worldbuilding. Details that I'm sure would bore you because they bored me. This book is so explainy. It wastes pages and pages at a time dumping exposition on you that you have to reread several times and it still doesn't make sense. Showing rather than telling, this book does not.
The overall impression you get is that people in this world are just really dumb or really selfish because instead of just using their awesome wizardly powers to protect kids, they put them all in one place, which draws the attentions of hordes of evil magic-eating entities that they then have to devise elaborate means of containing. In other words, its a self-created problem that makes no sense.
And then you have the main character whose name is...sigh...Galadriel. And she's SO cool and SO powerful you guys, but also SO snarky and SUCH a rebel who has everything figured out and how everyone else are sheep, but she's smart because she sees how the system is dumb. The narrator in the audible version really doesn't help with this either, because she really ramps the snark up to 11.
Perhaps I could have salvaged something positive to say about all of this if the book wasn't dripping in trope-ridden tiktok YA angst. I could go on about this but I'll just end by saying that I wouldn't be surprised seeing #enemiestolovers next to this book's title.
This story purports to tell the tale of the titular characters, Indigo and Cloud, who originally founded the colony that the main characters in the rest of the Raksura series are from.
I say “purports” because this book actually doesn't do that whatsoever. In fact, it only serves to contradict the existing lore. It's difficult to explain exactly why without spoilers, but I don't suggest you read this anyway if you're a fan of the main series.
SPOILERS START
So the story opens with Queen Indigo returning from a visit to another colony with a “stolen” consort named Cloud. It's explained that Cloud's mate, Argent, was treating him extremely poorly and didn't want him, so he convinced Indigo to rescue him. This of course creates a nasty political situation that they have the dig themselves out of, as Argent shows up demanding to duel Indigo for possession of Cloud.
Shortly after, we find out that Indigo was attracted to Cloud while Cloud initially had no feelings for her. He apparently “tricked” her into rescuing him. Indigo then says that no, she tricked him. We're not sure who to believe though, because we the readers don't get to see the initial conversation that led to the rescue, so we don't know which of them is lying and why.
Regardless, the big twist is that Cloud eventually decided that he likes Indigo after all, whereas Indigo has changed in the exact opposite way and no longer desires him. I actually thought this was kind of interesting (in a tragic way) and could have been a fun plot point if were more clearly explored. Except its never clear exactly why the characters flip flop on this because there is so little interaction between Indigo and Cloud. (I think they say a few sentences to each other the entire book–seriously, that's it. Neither of them is even the main POV character, either.) As a result, it just ends up seeming like immature teen drama without that extra context to make the characters seem more developed. Readers should be able to understand exactly why characters do or don't like each other, especially in a story so focused on romance as the primary plot point.
Anyways, the big climax happens when Indigo agrees to duel Argent for possession of Cloud. Except...not really, because the terms of the duel are that if Indigo wins, she gets Cloud. If Argent wins, Cloud goes back to his birth colony. This makes absolutely no sense because it destroys Argents motivation as a character. Why would she accept such a duel if the best outcome for her is that she doesn't get what she wanted anyway? Unless she didn't want Cloud after all...but then why pursue another Queen all the way to her colony and wait on her doorstep for a month?
The second big twist is that Indigo throws the duel on purpose so that she won't have Cloud after all. Which I guess fits her character motivations since she changed her mind and doesn't like him anyway. Still, publicly humiliating oneself by losing a duel in such a primal culture that values strength so highly seems like an extreme way to go about that.
So yeah, the story ends with Cloud going back to his birth colony, implying that they don't mate after all, Indigo Cloud (the tribe) never exists, none of the main characters from the main series are ever born, etc.
Except right after the story ends, there's a framing device where Moon and the other main characters from the modern, still-existing Indigo Cloud discover a physical, in-universe book that presumably tells the same story we just read. I was waiting for a moment where they realize “hey, wait! This makes no sense! How can our entire colony exist if our ancestors never mated?” But literally none of the main cast point out this obvious contradiction. For a brief moment, it seemed like Stone, who was alive at the time, knows something he's not saying. But the book ends without him saying anything or the main characters finding any new information to explain what happened.
So yeah. Not only does this story retcon the lore of Martha Welles otherwise intricately crafted universe, but it doesn't really even provide enough character interaction and development to explain why people act the way they do. I guess its supposed to be a tragic romance or something, but even on that level it doesn't satisfy.
As this series go on I find myself liking it less and less. The first book was about scrappy underdogs punching above their weight class in a gritty setting–cool stuff. But the second and third ones start to lean away from that. The heroes aren't winning through wits and derring do, but rather what begins to feel like random deus ex machinas and plot armor.
For example, the first book was all about how Julius was an outlier in dragon society, but he wasn't a pacifist. I definitely remember him beating people up and even cutting off a dude's hand. But then in the next few, he starts acting like a pacifist who doesn't believe in fighting at all, even self-defense. This was a wild face turn that left me a bit peeved. Julius' philosophy comes off as very preachy and naive. Being nice is one thing, but taking it to an extreme where you won't even fight to defend yourself or kill evil people is just lawful stupid.
Realistically, there's no way he should be able to come out on top by doing things like let people beat him up for no reason, yet that's exactly what happens because the author said so. At the end of the second book he traded away his future to force a winning outcome, but are there ever any actual consequences for that? No. One character even comments on this, saying “the universe goes out of its way to make Julius win even though he shouldn't” and I was like yeah, that's literally it. And its so disappointing too because every one of his victories in the first book felt earned. But now he has a seer on his side that can perfectly manipulate events to get any outcome he wants.
Part of the problem too is Marci. She went from a strong but grounded character with sensible limitations to ridiculously overpowered. A character one shots three god-like elder dragons at once, only to get beaten by her ghost cat because plot armor? At this point I'm starting to suspect she's a Mary Sue.
It just feels like there is no tension, consistency or sense of stakes anymore because the author is not taking her story seriously. Well at least they're some payoff in the climactic scenes? Well no not really. A bunch of characters will show up to a battle or something only for Marci to do everything herself.
Or maybe there will be a sword fight scene between two characters that gets glossed over in a paragraph and just skips to telling you who the winner is. Descriptions about things like parry, dodging, etc. create a sense of flow and tension to fight scenes. You get to see characters flex their skills and really sell the idea that yes, they are a swordmaster. But that satisfaction is robbed from the reader. You're just told Chelsea is really good and can beat Justin, but you don't get to actually watch her do it.
Then there's the cast of dragons that rarely actually take dragon form even in situations where it makes sense to. The coolest thing about dragons is them actually being dragons and ripping stuff apart with claws and fire, but that rarely happens. Most of the time, they just function as pretty humans. To be honest, it gives me “cute-core” type vibes. Especially when most of these characters, even 1000 year old dragons, are acting like petty teenagers.
What all of this adds up to is making me not invested in the outcome, because it always end up feeling contrived rather than an earned logical progression of events.
I thoroughly enjoyed the other books in this series but found this one to be lacking. It's very long winded, with nothing of substance really happening until about halfway through. After that point there is some derring-do, but the hook of the story (exploring an ancient city inhabited by the Raskura/Fell ancestors) kind of falls flat on its face. There was a cool opportunity here to expand on Raksuran lore and start answering some of the unsatisfying mysteries that were set up in The Siren Depths.
But no, instead they just kind of run around the city and don't really learn anything. There are a couple of badass fights, but the stakes of the story are so vague that it doesn't really matter. Like, their whole reason for being there essentially boiled down to “we have a vague prophecy that something bad will happen and this city is somehow related to it”. Of course, they do find a mcguffin, and there is a neat twist at the end, but it just kinda comes out of nowhere.
Its hard to really review this book without talking about the next one, so I'll stop here.
Much like the book before it, not a lot really happens in this novel until the very end. It's mostly a TON of boring travel, and when you finally do get some answers, the villain is so poorly developed that I was left scratching my head. On top of that, it doesn't answer any of the questions set up by the previous few books either. This entire two-book arc could have been condensed down into one book, and maybe it would have been more interesting.
I liked some of the concepts it plays with. Ancient magitech from lost civilizations is one of them–but the way its handled, it feels more like a plot device. There is also some time spent with the hybrid Raskura/Fell flight. I honestly thought they were really cool anti-villains, and then later on straight up heroes, but the text is split so much between so many different characters that I don't feel they got their due. I would have loved to read a whole book about them. So while interesting, they mainly present as a sidekicks.
The worst part is that the main cast: Jade, Moon, and co. kinda just bumble around and don't really take a lot of direct action to the plot. They spend most of the book just playing catch up to what other people are doing. Heck, there is a point at the end of the novel where it seems to spend pages and pages to building up an epic confrontation between Moon, Jade, and the Fell Overqueen or whatever. But then...Malachite shows up an unceremoniously kills her off in one blow.
You really have to judge this one together with the one before it, and I just don't think its worth the massive time investment to read 800 pages.
I felt compelled to come back to this and review it after trying a lot of books that were attempting to do the same thing. Seeing how badly they failed and exactly why made me appreciate this one a lot more.
Now to get a minor criticism out of the way, a lot of people are reviewing this and saying its unrealistic how French society in that time would actually behave towards a male crossdresser. But that's exactly it, I don't think the author is trying to be realistic. And frankly, that's not why you'd be reading a book like this. You'd be reading it because you want to see fantasy, you want to see the world the way it should be, and not how it actually is. To be honest I'm not sure why anyone would want to read a realistic version of this story. If it was, the Prince would be murdered or thrown in an insane asylum. That's not to say everything is perfect: there are real life issues of bigotry and intolerance explored here and I think the story is richer for that. There's a fine line between making something so depressingly realistic that its not fun and making it so idealized that there's no weight to it. Fortunately, I think the author found that line.
Anyway, onto the good. As a femboy/gnc male myself, its so refreshing to see a character like this depicted in a positive way without the author stumbling into the usual pitfalls. For example, the Prince is depicted as a cisgender male the whole way through and the text doesn't try to pathologize crossdressing as a trans behavior. He's simply a boy that wants to look pretty without that having to mean he's a woman deep inside. And while I'm totally fine with trans characters, I do think they are often overrepresented compared to simple gender nonconformers. To make my point: I've even seen a lot of people in reviews or comments online say the Prince is trans but the text simply doesn't support that.
Secondly, I really like that the Prince isn't a spineless wimp. All too often these kinds of stories show a very selectively misogynistic idea of what femininity is, applying all the negatives to feminine males and either applying the positives to women or turning the female characters into functional men. That isn't the case here. The Prince is written more or less how I would expect a typical female character to be written, and I think that's a good metric.
I think the best comparison for this is Princess Jellyfish. Same kind of vibe, pretty femboy shamelessly rocking gorgeous outfits. Though I'd have to say the Prince isn't as legendary a character as Kuranosuke, but that's ok.
The confusing thing about this novel is that it seems to be trying to emulate the Paths of the Eldar series by Gav Thorpe, which is about Craftworld Eldar. However, this isn't actually what the book is at all. Where each Paths book in the latter series shows us the unique perspective of one of three main characters during the same events, this book is more or less a linear plot using an omniscient narrator and a TON of characters. I was never once sure who the titular “Renegade” character was even supposed to be.
I suppose part of the issue is that Dark Eldar don't follow a path system in 40k lore, but that invites us to ask: why pretend to follow the formula laid down by Gav at all, then?
Ok, so ignoring the whole “paths” thing, what did I think of this book? Well, its ok. Just average, really. There's nothing I can specifically point to as bad. Chamber's prose and dialogue is actually pretty similar to Thorpe's. Action sequences are engaging without being overly descriptive or technical. The characters all speak and act like how you would expect haughty, selfish, sadistic Dark space elves to do so. The plot was an intriguing rollercoaster of various schemes, betrayals, and hedonistic splendor. I especially liked the tactile descriptions of Dark Eldar society: what it actually looks like and feels like to be there. There were actually several passages I had to reread several times because the scenes they were describing were so hypnotic and beautiful, albeit in macabre way.
What ultimately bums me out though is that by the end, I had little sense of why I should care about the events of the book. They were an interesting little spectacle, certainly, but none of the characters were ever developed enough for me to actually care about them. The plot ultimately feels totally meaningless as well, since almost every character winds up dead by the end and it doesn't advance 40k lore or the universe's overall metaplot in any way. I thought perhaps that this story, being the first in a series, was going to set up future events in some way. But not so; everything gets so neatly wrapped up that I'm left wondering where we are going from here and what the second book is going to be about. I doubt I'll have much remembrance of what happened in this narrative a week from now, and I certainly don't see any reason to ever reread it.
That being said, if you like Eldar and have ever wondered what the specifics of the dark kin's life might actually be like, this is not a waste of time by any means. You're not getting as much detail and deep exploration as Thorpe provides with his Paths series, so next to those, these are clearly inferior. However, I'd still recommend them to the right sort of reader. Just know that what you're getting is actually a pretty straightforward, pulpy adventure and not a character-driven one.
I'm posting a new review of this novel because I feel I need to set the record straight. My previous review misrepresented the book, though in my defense, that's because the first fifth or so does a pretty poor job at representing the rest of the book. That was the portion I'd read at a time and was therefore the only information I had to go off of.
So I stand by what I said in my first review, insofar as you understand I'm only applying these criticisms to the first 50 pages or so. Yes, it does kind of make it seem like the rest of the novel is going to be sissy wank material. Yes, Lucien is really cringe in the beginning. Yes, the She-Wolf is portrayed as a hulking, unlikable barbarian.
That said, the reason for all of those things is because you, the reader, are seeing things through Lucien's eyes and he is an extremely unreliable narrator. He's hopelessly naive about the real world because he's spent his entire life being lied to, indoctrinated with regressive religious ideas, sexually repressed, and treated like a slave. So its understandable that his POV is cringy. If you can go into the book knowing that though, you may be surprised by what you find.
Once you get past the early part, everything gets a lot better. The She-Wolf gets a lot more likable too, Lucien stops being so cringy, etc. Yes, she's physically stronger than him, but she doesn't lord that strength over him or abuse him in the way some of the early chapters might make you think. She has a surprisingly feminine side as well that adds a lot more depth to her character. I don't feel like she falls into toxic “girlboss” tropes at all. She's the patient and understanding companion who guides Lucien through his journey of self-discovery in a respectful way.
This is where the real crux of the novel is, Lucien slowly learning to overcome his religious programming and embracing a more 21st century view of sex and love. Some may criticize the novel's medieval world for being “unrealistically progressive”, but that doesn't bother me. I'm not looking for realism. Its fiction, so an alternate historical timeline is believable.
I didn't realize it at first but the more I read, the more I started to find myself identifying with Lucien's character. In particular, his feelings of shame over his sexuality and the fear the slightest transgression or sexual overture against a woman will make her shun him. I really identified with that as a man in 2025, really identified with how utterly terrified Lucien was about offending Glory because that is the daily reality I lived with for many years. I really appreciate that someone finally acknowledged the horror of the cultural messaging men face in this day and age, telling them that their sexually is evil and wrong, and showing the dire effects that can have on a person. This easily could have been yet another metacommentary about “incels” but Gale took the high road and portrayed Lucien in a sympathetic light instead. And for that I am eternally grateful. Well done, Gale.
Another thing I'd like to address. This book often gets recommended to people as a “femboy novel” in certain circles, and I just want to say that that's not at all what this book is. Not that there's anything wrong with that (I was actually hoping it would be, but I still enjoyed it anyway). Lucien may sexually submissive and have some effeminate-coded mannerisms, but he isn't female-presenting and he doesn't cross-dress. Additionally, a lot of the feminine traits he does have are hard to distinguish between pure innocence due to his monastic upbringing and actual feminine gender expression.
Therefore, I wouldn't call this a femboy novel, though I would definitely agree that it features gentle femdom and role reversal prominently. Glory is dominant but in a very loving and understanding way that I found refreshing, and Lucien is submissive to her not out of fear or the belief he's “not a real man” but because he wants to and feels empowered by it. There's no judgement or humiliation kink here. Rather, the book presents this dynamic in wholesome light that feels like a natural evolution of the character's personalities rather than just a kink. In fact there's really not much kink here at all, just vanilla sex where the woman takes charge and acts sexually aggressive. I really appreciated that subversive take on gender, though be warned your YMMV if that's not your cup of tea. I definitely wouldn't recommend this to people that are looking for a heteronormative experience, and that's ok. We can like different things.
As far as the plot goes, there really isn't much of it and it only serves to heighten the emotional drama of the characters. That's normally something I would complain about but I actually think it works really well here because the emotional drama was compelling. It's also fairly well paced. I was ready for them to just have sex already by the time it actually happened. Any less buildup and it would have been less impactful when it finally happened, and any more buildup and it would have dragged on too long.
There isn't much worldbuilding but again, you're not reading this for deep fantasy. You're reading it for the emotional drama and romantic chemistry. (And oh boy, there is tons of that.) What little there was was interesting to me and it helped carry the plot forward far enough without leaving gaping holes.
All in all, I'm very eager to see where the next book takes these two characters. Their romance is compelling and believable. They have genuine chemistry and it's a joy to seem them interact on a page.